Selma and me, we first met in a dumpster, but don’t either of us remember it. We was only a day or two old, see. But maybe the memory’s there somewheres, do you think? I don’t know. Anyways, we was almost the last of the AO babies, and now I gotta explain that. No story is ever simple, is it?
Okay. The first AO babies was way before our time, they was babies with cleft palates and no eyes and extra toes or something from Agent Orange that was used to kill plants in war and peace. A lot of babies was born that way until the companies making it went belly up in the peak oil days. Then the second AO babies come along, like us. These AOs was Abstinence Only babies, during the mini dark age when drug stores got burnt for selling condoms and doctors executed other doctors by lethal injection for doing abortions. Well, we all know now how Abstinence Only worked – like, dude, it didn’t – and me and Selma were the result.
By the time me and Selma was born, though, there was so many AO babies and the Great 21st Century Depression was almost into its eighth decade and there was so many people going hungry they began eating the babies. I mean, can you blame them? They’re starving and they can’t feed the kid anyway so they might’s well eat it. But that woke up a few of the fat cats in Washington finally, seeing people roasting babies over trash drums on the tv, and first they just made it illegal to eat babies. Fat lot of good that did. I mean, we look back now and see how dumb they were and can’t believe it: the government makes it illegal not to have a baby even if you can’t afford it or don’t want it, and then makes it illegal to eat it when you’re starving? Well, anyways, that didn’t work, as anyone could’a told �em, �specially after the Papal Bull saying if you have to choose between suicide by starvation or eating your kid, eating the kid is the lesser sin so long as it’s under the age of reason, whatever that is.
Okay, where was I? Oh, yeah. So finally there’s enough women in congress to actually matter, and what they did – the women, I mean, god love �em – they passed this law that sounded so right no one could stand up and say no to it. It was called the Child Responsibility Act – the CRA, or actually the CRA#1, because the second one came so close after. The CRA simply said the government would guarantee a child’s right from birth to age 21 to total health care, 24/7 parenting, lower and higher education, adequate clothing, food, and housing. The idea was to make those babies worth more alive than roasted, but then of course there was the question of where the money would come from, so that’s why they passed the second Child Responsibility Act, or CRA #2, which funded the whole program by a 75 percent tax on any group or individual or institution that impeded or discouraged or prevented access to birth control and abortion.
All the old farts said it would never work, but they reckoned without the IRS, which turned overnight into the world’s most vigilant pro-choice activist agency. Man, they had agents slogging through Georgia swamps and dog-sledding into Alaska snowfields to nail anyone who opposed condoms. It was a treat to see, they say, and for a while it was like a bounty on babies, which is why me and Selma didn’t get eaten but got fought over for adoption. Selma was raised by those famous two ladies whose bookstore in Ann Arbor had gone bust, and me, I ended up with a couple in Alabama to replace their dried up soybean subsidy.
You’d’a thought with that kind of bounty people would be droppin’ babies like flies, but that’s not what happened. I don’t know why, but it’s like as soon as everyone had a choice, fewer people decided to have babies, or decided to wait �til they were older, or just never got around to it, survival bein’ such a big uncertainty in those times. I know there’s lots of other factors that reduced population so drastically, like the midcentury floods and global warming plagues, but the two CRA laws were the first time Americans took any assertive action themselves. And with the economy rebounding after that final oil war and the solar maximum power surges, prosperity is more than a fantasy these days, with fewer people sharin’ the pie, so to speak.
I was in my twenties the year they moved the red death survivors north to fresh water and gave me a job teaching northern farmers how to grow warm weather crops. That was the first time me and Selma saw each other again. She was in the first Regional Parliament after the D.C. plague, and she come to my workshop to inspire the farmers. And the second our eyes met, we knew. I can’t explain how – maybe lying naked in a dumpster together, even if you’re just a few hours old, makes some kind of imprint. But we knew. She comes up smiling and holds out her hand – such a hand, long, brown fingers and pale, smooth palm.
“Bin 3173,” she says. “Good to see you again.”
Bin 3173 was the number of the dumpster we was found in, the number they put on our wrist-bands in the foundling hospital. I still had mine, a tiny band of plastic with those numbers embossed on it. She must’a kept hers, too.
The years since then we saw each other face to face only a few times, when she showed up to hear me play the old Gibson my adoptive daddy took such pains to teach me. They don’t let us of the male persuasion anywhere near parliamentary buildings, o’ course, but since they got the tv signals up again, I can see her sometimes, standing up there in Parliament, makes me proud like I had something to do with getting her there, which is totally dumb, but I can’t help that. I love her, see. And the best I can do about it is stay away, far away. She’s workin’ to rebuild a world where people live without killing each other or the planet, and all’s I know how to do is grow food and play old love songs on a antique guitar.
Brilliant — thanks for a fecund moment in my day!